You hear so many people whining today that the world is so cold and aloof and impersonal and people no longer relate– and oh God what happened to Mayberry RFD?

To hear them recount it, there is a monster at work here. It is called the Internet and it is driving people apart. No one even knows what emotions are. Instead of talking to each other, writing to each other, they hide behind email. It is a bloodless, forbidden planet. A far cry from the good old days.

But were they really so good?
I write a bunch of blogs that fly out in cyberspace to all kinds of perfect strangers. None are hand written. None of the envelopes are embossed with melted candle wax. None even have envelopes.

What a cold bastard I am. What a frozen electronic world I communicate in.
Just ask the prisoners of the “Good Old Days.” They’ll tell you.

But then, just for the sake of fair and balanced, you will have to ask someone else. Actually, thousands of others. They are the human beings who read my electronic musings and who write back the most personal, sensitive, revealing, heartfelt, vulnerable responses one could imagine writing - not only to a perfect stranger - but to a deep and loyal friend for life.

And I think I know why. When people communicate electronically, they (not all, but many) feel more comfortable than doing it the way it was done in the Good Old Days.

Remember this when it comes to pitches and stories and letters to media contacts and by-line stories. Except for a few clingers to the sides of the Titanic, no one cares how the message is communicated.

They just care about the message.

That will never go out of style.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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We are in the thick of a white water presidential race. A snow-White woman is engaged in a heated political battle with a Black man. She was always in favor of a Black president with the non-negotiable caveat that he had to be
her husband, so to speak. In other words, as long as said Black president was in fact White.

To try and stop the genuine Black man from gaining entry to The White House, the former first lady’s sycophants sent to the media a photo of the Black candidate wearing African garb, attempting to highlight the depths of his Blackness in contrast to the so-called “first Black president” who was (wink, wink) of course White.

To which media did they send this African garb photo? To the old grey lady that is said to present All The News That’s Fit To Print? No, they go digital with The Drudge Report. Why? Because people do more than read Drudge- they believe it. Increasingly, digi Drudge has more credibility and reach than The New York Times. The line between print and digital is becoming more black and white.

When another hit squad took a would-be sex scandal to the media, they chose the old grey lady because they knew her opinion of John McCain is black and white. They should have gone digi, says the Huffington Post, because the grey lady is now black and white. No one believes her. Even her own ombudsman. The story was judged, far and wide, to be a hit job in print.  Black and white.

If you think digi PR is a sideshow, ask Hillary. The Times they are not a changin, they have done a 180.

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Remember when the press conference used to be a viable tool of the PR professional. Today, forget it. Unless you have a presidential candidate slandering a competitor or GM admitting they make junk on wheels and are going to change their evils ways, baby, no one shows.

The Internet is a major culprit. And a savior. But you have to use it to make it work for you. The Web that is.

The fact is news reporters want packaged stories more than ever before. So turning out en masse for a press conference, well in most cases, that’s not happening. Most of us know that. Have learned it the hard way.

The question is, what do we do with the knowledge. One sound approach is to spell “press conference” as “webinar.” If you have a message of urgency and importance, the build it and they will come axiom will prevail. Ideas are the currency of the Internet. The really great thing is that by fusing the Web and a powerful idea, you can be a PR direct marketer, taking your message not only to the reporters’ blackberries but to their readers as well.

If the idea is big enough, the bloggers will attend the webinar, the reporters who monitor and\or cover the bloggers will attend and voila, what’s a press conference again?

How do you make this work:

• Save your silver bullets for the really big ideas. If the idea doesn’t have the power to turn heads, you will put on a show no one will attend.
• Remember the old Hollywood rule: Make a bad movie and people will stay away in droves.
• Salt the web with teasers before you run the Webinar. A compelling video clip on YouTube or a podcast that hints at what’s to come.
• Reach out to key movers and influencers, giving them special access to or participation in the Webinar.
• Pull out every stop to bring in a major brand, product or celebrity.

There’s only one Meet The Press and Tim’s not letting you on. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not 1990.

You don’t need him!

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I am standing here in the midst of a blizzard. One I brought on myself, with the help of a few thousand of my closest friends. All I did was press the Blizzard Button and voila, the perfect storm began.

There is no snow or wind associated with this storm. Just words. Ideas. Opinions. And they riccochet off each other and fly off into space and zoom off satelittes and pounce on websites and materialize on blackberrys.

I tossed out a proposition about God, that we can learn from Him (from the great religions of the world) to be better businesspeople. And then my PR team placed the concept on the websites of various magazines and readers liked or hated what I said and passed on comments and, emailed friends, and shot off fyi’s to other editors and on and on.

All we did was throw an intellectual stone into the middle of the cyber-ocean and a chain reaction of responses transported my proposition from New York to Delhi, from the Christian community to the business elite, from CEOs at Siemens’ Ascent Conference in Berlin to Donald Trump, to a realtor in Orange County.

The true power of digitial PR is that once you give birth to a provocative idea, a million carrier pigeons take over, spreading the message for you. Unlike traditional PR, you don’t have to ask, or should I say plead, with others to run the story, you can’t stop them. The blizzard is a self-perpetuating machine. It is a thing of awe and beauty.

How do you seed the storm:

1. Make sure your idea has teeth. No one is going to get viral with pablum.
2. Help to accelerate the wind speed by incorporating your messsage in a blog and linking every blogger who responds to your idea to your blog.
3. Seek links from every site that picks up on your message and broadcasts it to their community.
4. Ask opinion leaders in each relevant community to opine on your idea and to spread their thoughts to their constituents.

Then sit back, put a log on the fire and enjoy the storm. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.

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